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Learning the names of geometric shapes is at the intersection of early spatial, mathematical, and language skills, all important for school-readiness and predictors of later abilities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). We investigated whether socioeconomic status (SES) influenced children’s processing of shape names and whether differences in processing were predictive of later spatial skills. 3-year-olds (N = 79) with mothers of varying education levels participated in an eye-tracking task that required them to look at named shapes. Lower-SES children took longer to fixate target shapes and spent less time looking at them than higher-SES children. Gaze variables measured at age 3 were predictive of spatial skills measured at age 5 even though the spatial measures did not require shape-related vocabulary. Early efficiency in the processing of shape names may contribute to the development of a foundation for spatial learning in the preschool years.

Languages are often categorized as having either predictable (fixed or quantity-sensitive) or non-predictable stress. Despite their name, fixed stress languages may have exceptions, so in fact, their stress does not always appear in the same position. Since predictability has been shown to affect certain speech phenomena, with additional or redundant acoustic cues being provided when the linguistic content is less predictable (e.g., Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis), we investigate whether, and to what extent, the predictability of stress position affects the manifestation of stress in different languages. We examine the acoustic properties of stress in three languages classified as having fixed stress (Turkish, French, Armenian), with exceptions, and in one language with non-predictable-stress, Brazilian Portuguese. Specifically, we compare the manifestation of stress in the canonical stress (typically "fixed") position with its manifestation in the noncanonical (exceptional) position, where it would potentially be less predictable. We also compare these patterns with the manifestation of stress in Portuguese, in both the "default" penultimate and the less common final position. Our results show that stress is manifested quite similarly in canonical and non-canonical positions in the "fixed" stress languages and stress is most clearly produced when it is least predictable.

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Mental Abacus (MA) is a popular arithmetic technique in which students learn to solve math problems by visualizing a physical abacus structure. Prior studies conducted in Asia have found that MA can lead to exceptional mathematics achievement in highly motivated individuals, and that extensive training over multiple years can also benefit students in standard classroom settings. Here we explored the benefits of shorter-term MA training to typical students in a US school. Specifically, we tested whether MA (1) improves arithmetic performance relative to a standard math curriculum, and (2) leads to changes in spatial working memory, as claimed by several recent reports. To address these questions, we conducted a one-year, classroom-randomized trial of MA instruction. We found that first-graders students struggled to achieve abacus expertise over the course of the year, while second-graders were more successful. Neither age group showed a significant advantage in cognitive abilities or mathematical computation relative to controls, although older children showed some hints of an advantage in learning place-value concepts. Overall, our results suggest caution in the adoption of MA as a short-term educational intervention.

Although some phonetic variability is inevitable in speech production, adult speech is fairly consistent. Thus, part of becoming a competent adult speaker is learning to appropriately limit the variability in one's speech. It is generally believed that phonology is mastered relatively early; however, this does not take into account the refinement of articulation required to reign in the variability in production. In this paper, we investigate the development of the acoustic properties (i.e., F0, Duration, and Intensity) of two prosodic patterns of English, compound and phrasal prominence, as well as their patterns of variability, in the speech of 6-, 8-, and 11-year-olds. While the 11-year-olds show adult-like acoustic patterns in their compound prosody, no children are adult-like in phrasal prominence. Examination of the variability at the different ages shows, moreover, that even the 11-year-olds have not yet refined their speech to the same extent as adults. Thus, examination of these more subtle aspects of phonological acquisition demonstrates that the process continues for much longer than is typically assumed, and usually studied.

In the current study, we explore the factors underlying the well-known difficulty in acoustic classification of front nonsibilant fricatives (Maniwa, Jongman & Wade 2009, McMurray & Jongman 2011) by applying a novel classification method to the production of Greek speakers. The Greek fricative inventory [f v θ ð s z ç ʝ x ɣ] includes voiced and voiceless segments from five distinct places of articulation. Our corpus contains all of the Greek fricatives produced by 29 monolingual speakers, but our focus is on the distinction between the front nonsibilant fricatives [f v θ ð]. For comparison, we also discuss the other places of articulation where relevant. We apply a relatively novel classification method based on cepstral coefficients, previously successful in categorizing English obstruent bursts (Bunnell, Polikoff & McNicholas 2004), English vowels (Ferragne & Pellegrino 2010), Romanian fricatives (Spinu & Lilley 2016), and Russian fricatives (Spinu, Kochetov & Lilley 2018). For this study, fricative boundaries were automatically aligned using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and then manually checked. Six Bark-frequency cepstral coefficients (c0–c5) were extracted from 20-millisecond Hann windows. HMMs were used to divide the fricatives and adjacent vowels into three regions of internally minimized variance. A multinomial logistic regression analysis then used the mean cepstral coefficients from each region as predictors for classification by consonant identity. Our method yields highly successful classification rates, exceeding the performance of previous methods. We discuss these results in light of the differences of the phonemic distributions of fricatives between English and Greek.

Languages frequently express focus by enhancing various acoustic attributes of an utterance, but it is widely accepted that the main enhancement appears on stressed syllables. In languages without lexical stress, the question arises as to how focus is acoustically manifested. We thus examine the acoustic properties associated with prominence in three stressless languages, Indonesian, Korean and Vietnamese, comparing real three-syllable words in non-focused and focused contexts. Despite other prosodic differences, our findings confirm that none of the languages exhibits stress in the absence of focus, and under focus, no syllable shows consistent enhancement that could be indirectly interpreted as a manifestation of focus. Instead, a combination of boundary phenomena consistent with the right edge of a major prosodic constituent (Intonational Phrase) appears in each language: increased duration on the final syllable and in Indonesian and Korean, a decrease in F0. Since these properties are also found in languages with stress, we suggest that boundary phenomena signaling a major prosodic constituent break are used universally to indicate focus, regardless of a language's word-prosody; stress languages may use the same boundary properties, but these are most likely to be combined with enhancement of the stressed syllable of a word.